Italian Startup Creates Dual Extruder Upgrade for Ultimaker 3D Printers

What do you do when you need a customized feature for your 3D printer? Do you wait until the company that made it comes up the solution you need? Email their support department every day until they take notice?

If you’re Samuele Bianchi Bazzi, a 19-year-old entrepreneur and maker in Italy, you put together a team and take on the project yourself. Bazzi is the owner of Creatr, an Italian startup 3D printing company, and his firm is an official reseller for Ultimaker there.

“Everybody knows the Ultimaker 2 is one of the best desktop 3D printers out there,” Bazzi says. “However, they currently have only one extruder.”

Therein lies the problem, and Bazzi and Creatr decided to take matters into their own hands. He says that after waiting for a dual extruder upgrade kit for a number of months, they simply forged ahead and made their own.

“We’re really proud of what we have managed to achieve,” Bazzi says.

The kit is an aluminum design to best handle heat transfer and cooling issues. The extruder nozzles are in bronze, and Bazzi says that the design is optimized to reduce retraction blobs.

Since the dual extruder upgrade kit is made completely from metal, he says it can also handle printing chores using filaments like polycarbonate and other high temperature resistant materials. In testing, Bazzi says the new dual extruders have functioned well in stable operating temperatures in excess of 350°C with thermocouples.

The kit will also include an easy-to-follow guide on how to upgrade the firmware to fully support the new extruders.

Bazzi calls it the Ultimaker Dual Extruder Upgrade Kit, and Creatr says it’s designed to work with both the UM 2 and the original version, the UM.

“It’s really simple to mount, and has all the necessary components included,” Bazzi says.

And not to worry, if you notice that the photos don’t include fans, Bazzi says he and his team were printing with ABS and HIPS. The full kit includes two side-mounted fans to cool parts as needed.

For their part, Ultimaker says that, even though Creatr is an official reseller for Ultimaker, this upgrade is not an official Ultimaker product.

And Bazzi says he’s still not sure if the upgrade will be an open-source innovation.

The dual extruder upgrade does cut down on the total build volume, but with a center-to-center distance between the nozzles of just 18mm, Bazzi says the build volume in the “x” direction won’t be significantly reduced. He says the nozzles will be compatible with E3D versions and use same thread size.

Creatr says the price for the kit will come in somewhere around €250.

He adds that as the company that was supposed to build the final prototype before production failed to meet a deadline, they should be ready in time for Christmas.

If you want more information about the Ultimmaker Dual Extruder Upgrade Kit from Creatr, or to pre-order your own, you can contact them via email at hello@creatr.it

Let us know if you think this dual extruder upgrade for the Ultimaker line of printers will work in the Dual Extruder Upgrade for Ultimaker Printers thread at 3DPB.com.